homeward to meet his assassins; the hour when ’light thickens,’ when ‘night’s black agents to their prey do rouse,’ when the wolf begins to howl, and the owl to scream, and withered murder steals forth to his work.  Macbeth bids the stars hide their fires that his ‘black’ desires may be concealed; Lady Macbeth calls on thick night to come, palled in the dunnest smoke of hell.  The moon is down and no stars shine when Banquo, dreading the dreams of the coming night, goes unwillingly to bed, and leaves Macbeth to wait for the summons of the little bell.  When the next day should dawn, its light is ‘strangled,’ and ‘darkness does the face of earth entomb.’  In the whole drama the sun seems to shine only twice:  first, in the beautiful but ironical passage where Duncan sees the swallows flitting round the castle of death; and, afterwards, when at the close the avenging army gathers to rid the earth of its shame.  Of the many slighter touches which deepen this effect I notice only one.  The failure of nature in Lady Macbeth is marked by her fear of darkness; ‘she has light by her continually.’  And in the one phrase of fear that escapes her lips even in sleep, it is of the darkness of the place of torment that she speaks.[195]

The atmosphere of Macbeth, however, is not that of unrelieved blackness.  On the contrary, as compared with King Lear and its cold dim gloom, Macbeth leaves a decided impression of colour; it is really the impression of a black night broken by flashes of light and colour, sometimes vivid and even glaring.  They are the lights and colours of the thunder-storm in the first scene; of the dagger hanging before Macbeth’s eyes and glittering alone in the midnight air; of the torch borne by the servant when he and his lord come upon Banquo crossing the castle-court to his room; of the torch, again, which Fleance carried to light his father to death, and which was dashed out by one of the murderers; of the torches that flared in the hall on the face of the Ghost and the blanched cheeks of Macbeth; of the flames beneath the boiling caldron from which the apparitions in the cavern rose; of the taper which showed to the Doctor and Gentlewoman the wasted face and blank eyes of Lady Macbeth.  And, above all, the colour is the colour of blood.  It cannot be an accident that the image of blood is forced upon us continually, not merely by the events themselves, but by full descriptions, and even by reiteration of the word in unlikely parts of the dialogue.  The Witches, after their first wild appearance, have hardly quitted the stage when there staggers onto it a ‘bloody man,’ gashed with wounds.  His tale is of a hero whose ‘brandished steel smoked with bloody execution,’ ’carved out a passage’ to his enemy, and ’unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps.’  And then he tells of a second battle so bloody that the combatants seemed as if they ‘meant to bathe in reeking wounds.’  What metaphors!  What a dreadful image is that with which Lady Macbeth greets us almost